So it was sad that the Dandy admitted this week that it was wavering over whether to close. Sales today are a quarter of what they were in 2007. The circulation is just over 7,000 today. There are about 500 subscribers in all, enough to fit into a medium-sized playground.

If he actually wins this election, then this has just further solidified my opinion that Kansas and Missouri both should just be emptied of people outside of the highway corridors and given back to the buffalo. There's no hope for the Midwest any longer, the tea party idiots have convinced every last Overland Park resident that they carved out their own homestead with a shotgun and a handful of salt and dammit, that's their land and no gummint varmint is gonna tell them what to do.

Why is everybody so down on rape? This is what Mike Huckabee wanted to know today, on his radio program, which also featured Rep. Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin as a guest. For instance, did you know that Ethel Waters was conceived when her mother got raped? Do you know what a world without rape would look like? A world without Ethel Waters, that's what.

There has been a campaign in Uzbek media denouncing Western mass culture for encouraging "immorality" among the youth and for "damaging the country's national values and traditions". Rap, rock and heavy metal have been labelled "alien music" and some genres have been subsequently banned.Recently even Russian state TV broadcast claimed that goths engage in cannibalism. Many Uzbeks watch Russian television and are influenced by such coverage.During one punk rock concert during the last two years, masked police turned up in large numbers and began rounding up the fans, detaining some for several hours.

A couple of weeks ago, the Centro de Estudios Borjanos in Borja, Spain, received a donation from the granddaughter of 19th-century painter Elías García Martínez. At the time, the Centro knew of only one painting by Martínez in Borja — Ecce Homo, a fresco on the walls of the church of Santuario de Misericordia.

That's it above. The leftmost image is how the painting looked two years ago; the middle image is how it looked in July, when it was photographed for a catalog of regional religious art. The image on right is how it looked when the Centro went to check it out on August 6th after receiving the donation. Hmm.

The restored version is apparently the work of an octogenarian neighbor of the church, who, noticing the damage to the painting, took it upon herself to restore the painting "with good intentions" but "without asking permission," as culture councillor Juan Maria de Ojeda put it. It became clear to the amateur restorer — quickly, one imagines — that "she had gotten out of hand," and she confessed to local authorities.